WISHBONE

Μαρ 21, 2025 Κινηματογράφος 0

MOVIE REVIEW

BETWEEN DREAM AND TRAGEDY

Wishbone: written by Giannis Fragoulis

Penny Panagiotopoulou’s film was screened at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 2024. It found distribution relatively late and, in this way, it can communicate its message to its audience in Greece. The film penetratingly examines the relationships between people in contemporary Greek society, and tragically depicts the deadlocks that are inscribed in the social field.

Wishbone: The story

Kostas is 28 years old. He has been working for a few months as a guard in a public hospital. Money is not great, he still lives in his mother’s house, in his childhood room with the teenage posters on the wall. He dates Stella, who is studying accounting, and they make love in her miserable dorm room. He dreams of a fast motorcycle. Anyway, the money isn’t even enough for that. But he feels that their life belongs to them because they are young.

One day his older brother suddenly collapses before his eyes. Now, he has to take care of his six-year-old niece, little Niki, and also find money to save their house from debt. He asks his sister-in-law for help, but she has been struggling with depression for years. She is estranged from both his family and her child. He is desperate for cash, even a little, and can’t find it anywhere. A ray of light pierces the pitch black darkness. Nondas, his 50-year-old colleague and paramedic, wants to welcome him into his own family, a hospital circuit that sets up medical malpractice cases. But the price will be high.

Wishbone: The style

Penny Panagotopoulou’s cinematography is simple and concise. She follows her protagonist at work, in his love affair, in his family. We have, at first sight, a simple story. Kostas’ brother expresses his concern about his relationship with his wife. The twist comes when he collapses and ends up in the hospital. Now Kostas is on his own. He has, as support, his girlfriend who, it seems, loves him. But his relationship has a little flaw, which seems to be going not so well.

In Penny Panagiotopoulou’s writing we have a good form of a situation and something, an obstacle, that probably shouldn’t worry us. When that «something» is the cause of the collapse, that will be the subversion. The director knows how to march from one point to another and, in doing so, unfold a tragic page that will be what the protagonist experiences. She uses the contrasts to reach the impasse where the tragic will note its greatest breadth.

Wishbone: The process

From « Hard Goodbyes: My Father» to this film, the director has followed the same line. The viewer experiences and discovers the tragedy along with the director. He becomes a co-creator of the film text and, in the end, he can see the whole narrative path if he turns his gaze towards the beginning of this path. At this point he can understand the scope of the tragic in two different ways: as an evolving narrative and as an experience. These two different ways produce, inductively, his own narrative, since his psychic world has now come into contact with the one proposed by the film.

When the end is so tragic that he cannot bear it, the pain becomes less, more bearable and it is the beginning of the creation of a different universe that will open up ways for him to read these issues that concern him with a clearer view. Panagiotopoulou’s cinema is psychotherapeutic, within the limits that art can heal. It fulfills the role of art as it has existed from antiquity to the present day.

Wishbone: The characteristics

Viewers, we believe, will give the film the prize it was not given at the Thessaloniki Film Festival with their attention and love. The emotion comes out spontaneously at exactly the right moment, in such a way that it gives it the power to understand those elements of society that test the soul of man, as another of Dante’s infernos. This is an additional reason why we believe this film deserves our love and appreciation.

Add to that the very good performances that balance between the tragic and the outrageous and come out unscathed, the very good editing that works with contrasts, as mentioned above, the writing that captures the factual and gives it outrageous intensity, the direction that dares to create a charming and, at the same time, repulsive work, the overall cinematic structure that is wonderful, then we will see that we have an amazing film from a filmmaker who has never let us down.

WISHBONE

Directed by Penny Panagiotopoulou

Script: Penny Panagiotopoulou, Kallia Papadakis (based on the short story “40 Days” by Kallia Papadakis from the collection “The Sound of the Uncovered”)

Photo: Dimitris Katsaitis

Editing by Petar Markovic

Music: Petar Marković Petar Marković Petar Marković

Sound: Dinos Kittou, Bruno Tarrière, Giorgos Mikrogiannakis

Sets: George Georgiou

Costumes: Despina Chimona

Producers: Penny Panagiotopoulou, Birgit Kemner, Martin Hampel, Thanasis Karathanos, Stelios Kammitsis

Actors: Yannis Karambas (Kostas), Konstantinos Avarikiotis (Nontas), Alexandra Sakellaropoulou (Despina, Kostas’ mother), Garoufalina Kontozou (Niki), Elena Mavridou (Chrysa), Evthalia Papakosta (Stella), Myrto Alikaki (Vassiliou, doctor), Nikolas Papagiannis (Kostas’ brother), Andreas Natsios (Areti’s husband), Maria Katsandri (nurse Maria)

Production country: Greece, Cyprus, Germany, France

Year of production: 2024

Colour: colour

Language: greek

Genre: tragedy

Duration: 120΄

Distribution Company: Rosebud21

Release date: 20/3/2025

For more information on the coefficients and technical characteristics, see here..

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